2013-02-17

So Posterous is shutting down. It's a shame, since there was a lot to like about Posterous, but that's how it goes with web companies. I always thought it made an impressively effective use of email to manage posting.

And that makes migration easy! At least, for some blogs, with not too many posts.

To begin, set up a new blog on Blogger (or other blog hosting service that supports posting by email, which is common). Open up your email program and find all the messages you sent to as posts to Posterous. Resend all the posts to Blogger, then go through them to clean up any problems that may have arisen with links in the posts. If you don't have too many posts to deal with, this can be reasonably quick.

This blog is the result of re-sending the small set of posts from openletters.posterous.com. The openletters blog name was taken, but that doesn't really matter—reopenletters is close enough. Since basically every post has links or videos, I had to check all of them, and actually wound up having to make some adjustments to all of them. But since there weren't too many, it only took about half an hour. Just researching to find the "right" way to do the migration would have taken longer.

The only drawback I encountered is that the dates have all changed. I could fix that, but I don't see it as worthwhile.

I've been waiting for this to show up on YouTube since YouTube first showed up. Probably the greatest TV holiday special ever, and certainly the only one starring a megalomaniac pig: Will Vinton's Claymation Comedy of Horrors!

The Smothers Brothers may have the best comedic timing of any group I've ever seen. They're just perfect in this video. Dick's abilities are shown especially well here, he is just a monster of a straight man.

There's just so much to like in that article. I think the best part may be the way the numbers chosen by the plaintiff are not round, making it seem like they were the result of some sort of insane calculation.

I just added an entry for the entire world to my address book! Obviously, not really the entire world, but the email address that sends something to this blog. However, it will look fun for a human recipient, and should make clear that the message is not to be viewed as even a little private.

Have you heard of Posterous? It's a blogging system built on the idea that you can just use email to write and submit what you want posted. It claims to handle images, sound, and video in a straightforward way, but I haven't tried that yet.

Email as interface suggests an interesting possibility. How often is it that I send you a link to something I think you'd find interesting? Pretty often, it's fair to say. There's nothing personal in these messages, normally, so they could actually be passed on to anyone at all. It seems that Posterous is perfect for this: send an email and CC the entire world by CCing a Posterous blog. You may have noticed that I did just that in this message; let's see how it works!